The new dangers of the lost world.
Creative Staff:
Story: Frank Cho, Doug Murray
Art: Jack Jadson
What They Say:
When we last saw Jana the Jungle Girl, she had escaped from an underwater city and fired a torpedo into the eye of a gigantic underworldly creature of some kind. Bad Move! Her father tells her that those actions have doomed the Lost World in which they all live — and no sooner does he say that, then things begin to happen. A hole appears in the sky and flaming debris falls through. The jungle begins to burn… Jana and her friends are forced to turn a stampede of gigantic prehistoric creatures who are fleeing before the fire. Can Jana stop the stampede? Will she survive the displaced natives intent on claiming a new homeland? And what other alien materials will emerge from the hole in the sky?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The third “season” of Jungle Girl kicks off here and I feel sad in the fact that I never checked out this book before. With the new season here, it felt like a decent jumping on point, but it’s the kind that you’re definitely coming into the middle of a lot of different things, which you can figure you easily enough. The central concept is still basically that female Tarzan angle as it’s familiar if you’ve seen any previous jungle oriented property before, but it has a nicely updated aspect in some ways that keeps it fresh but still old school. I had initially grabbed his as I saw Frank Cho’s cover artwork for it, and thought he might be doing the interiors, but was really pleased to see Jack Jadson doing the art here. Having enjoyed his recent Vampirella: Feary Tales work, getting more of his stuff is a good thing.
Since this miniseries takes place after the events of the prior two, we do get caught up on those wacky events in the preamble page but also in the course of the book itself as Jana talks about what happened to her father while Mike and Togg just stare on at the chaos that’s followed. With the group having survived whatever kind of thing that Fish-Men wanted to sacrifice them to, believing it to be a good, the island is in chaos now and all the creatures and all the dinosaurs are running wild, which has Jana and the others doing their best to protect the village. It’s a solid action sequence that moves throughout much of the book while filling the reader in on what’s going on and what’s at stake. With Jana’s father, he’s certainly displeased by her going to the God Mountain because he knew bad things like this would happen, though his chastising feels a bit weak in the face of lots of dinosaurs wanting to devour them.
The book has the whole destruction thing going on but is also upping the ante in a really fun old school kind of way as amid it all, a flying saucer has arrived to add its own bit of flair to the mix. While Jana and the others can’t do much about it at the moment with what they’re already facing, others on the island see it as a sign to go forth and conquer now that their sky-gods have returned. This sets more action into motion, which is pretty much the main driver of events here as opposed to character material. The flow of the book is strong with this and it does carry you through, though because of it you end up finishing it quickly. But with Jadson’s artwork, going back and poring over the finer details of it is completely worth the time as there’s some great, dynamic material here and some very appealing character designs.
In Summary:
For a first experience with this property, it wasn’t all that bad. Jungle Girl does have that kind of light touch to it approach where it does give off the serialized feeling in a way, but able to go bigger and flashier because of the fact there’s no real budget to it. Story wise, it’s a mishmash of things on this particular little lost world island as we get different types of people, aliens and dinosaurs all thrown into the mix. Jana’s obviously the main character and that has a lot of attention on her, but she’s well portrayed and even though the cover goes all jungle design on her, she’s actually kept less obvious here in a way. Well, less obvious in that she’s wearing a full body tight black suit, so it’s still full of fanservice but not quite as blatant as the jungle bikini. In the end though, Jungle Girl is a continuation here and not exactly a jumping on point, which is fine, but it makes it a bit harder to get into things. The tone of the book is certainly intriguing and there’s a lot of simple fun to be had here that makes me curious where it’ll go now that aliens are thrown into the mix.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: April 8th, 2015
MSRP: $3.99
